Why I Lost That I.T. Job

BELLEVUE, WA-- You may have won this round. It is quite possible that I forgot to backup the web server that evening, but believe me, it was only because I was busy upgrading the firmware on our firewall, and probably editing the .html documents for the company's mission statement. Firing me will only make me stronger.

Firing me was so weak.

It seems quite obvious now that you had a problem with what you call "my attitude". You certainly had an issue with the hours that I worked. But even had I shown up at 8:30 when my job started, instead of rolling in at 8:42, I'm sure no one would have noticed. Had I been "on-time," those twelve minutes would have undoubtedly been spent mixing my Mt. Dew with Cherry Pepsi anyway, a concoction that makes me more productive than any two other IT personnel put together.

Perhaps you thought I should have limited my trips to the lunchroom, or waited for an "official" break to stink up the bathroom. Maybe it was that time I borrowed from the honour-system snack-tray without paying. You know I would have paid that back because that's what honour is all about. Just ask the Klingons.

No, I think that perhaps management was envious of my care-free lifestyle. They only wished that they could show up everyday in t-shirts, cut-offs, and sandals. If anyone had problems with me playing Limp Bizkit MP3s in my cubicle, they should have told me. And so what if I never refilled the coffee pot, or that I left month-old burritos in the back of the lunchroom fridge. An IT professional concerns himself with keeping the system clean, not the kitchen.

I think that I am being set up as a scapegoat.

Oh, maybe I shouldn't have Photoshopped the vice-president's head onto Lucy Lawless's body, and perhaps I shouldn't have used the OC3 to pad my DivX collection. Do you think I knew that someone was going to give out the IP for my FTP server? Sheesh, the ISP returned our connection a mere five hours later.

You can hardly attribute my dismissal to work performance. I worked just as hard as anyone else in the IT department. It's just coincidence that you happened to see me surfing the Internet all those times--they were obviously during breaks, and I was probably following links from Tech Republic anyway. And when you caught me playing The Sims on the marketing department's PC, it was obviously just to test the processing speed of that machine. You knew the Quake server I was running was purely meant for measuring the network's capabilities. You needn't have been so harsh with me when I was in the middle of "testing" that new deathmatch map.

You're not blaming me for my interoffice correspondences are you? The e-mails I sent to the staff every day were all humorous in nature, and I thought everyone liked the blonde jokes. Just because one or two of the clerical staff registered complaints, it didn't make me Mr. Inconsiderate. Those chicks needed to loosen their hair anyhow.

Was it because of the bulk CD-Rs that I ordered on the Staple's account? How else was I supposed to remove the warez from the system? I should have gotten some credit for initiative there.

I guess that management has already forgotten my other accomplishments--like saving the company from having to spend all that money on licensed versions of Microsoft Word. Was I supposed to know that we would be audited the next week? And if you are going to pin that whole virus thing on me, you better remember that I developed that worm on my own time. It's not my fault that the morons in accounting thought it was an upgrade to their spreadsheet software. You could have at least thanked me for removing it. Besides, they had printouts for those six months of reports.

So I guess this whole firing thing is a personality conflict. It's obvious to me that I was rising up too fast, and someone like you got scared and needed to shoot me down. You may have defeated me this time, but I will rise again.

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